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Theodore C. Sorensen, 82, Kennedy Counselor, Dies

Theodore C. Sorensen with President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office in 1961.Credit
George Tames/The New York Times

Theodore C. Sorensen, one of the last links to John F. Kennedy’s administration, a writer and counselor who did much to shape the president’s narrative, image and legacy, died Sunday in Manhattan. He was 82.

His death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, was from complications of a stroke he suffered a week ago, his wife, Gillian Sorensen, said.

Mr. Sorensen once said he suspected that the headline on his obituary would read “Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy Speechwriter,” misspelling his name and misjudging his work, but he was much more. He was a political strategist and a trusted adviser on everything from election tactics to foreign policy.

“You need a mind like Sorensen’s around you that’s clicking and clicking all the time,” Kennedy’s archrival, Richard M. Nixon, said in 1962. He said Mr. Sorensen had “a rare gift”: the knack of finding phrases that penetrated the American psyche.

He was best known for working with Kennedy on passages of soaring rhetoric, including the 1961 inaugural address proclaiming that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans” and challenging citizens: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Mr. Sorensen drew on the Bible, the Gettysburg Address and the words of Thomas Jefferson and Winston Churchill as he helped hone and polish that speech.

First hired as a researcher by Kennedy, a newly elected senator from Massachusetts who took office in 1953, Mr. Sorensen collaborated closely — more closely than most knew — on “Profiles in Courage,” the 1956 book that won Kennedy a Pulitzer Prize and a national audience.

After the president’s assassination, Mr. Sorensen practiced law and politics. But in the public mind, his name was forever joined to the man he had served; his first task after leaving the White House was to recount the abridged administration’s story in a 783-page best seller simply titled “Kennedy.”

He held the title of special counsel, but Washington reporters of the era labeled him the president’s “intellectual alter ago” and “a lobe of Kennedy’s mind.” Mr. Sorensen called these exaggerations, but they were rooted in some truth.

Kennedy had plenty of yes-men. He needed a no-man from time to time. The president trusted Mr. Sorensen to play that role in crises foreign and domestic, and he played it well, in the judgment of Robert F. Kennedy, his brother’s attorney general. “If it was difficult,” Robert Kennedy said, “Ted Sorensen was brought in.”

Mr. Sorensen was proudest of a work written in haste, under crushing pressure. In October 1962, when he was 34 years old, he drafted a letter from Kennedy to the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, which helped end the Cuban missile crisis. After the Kennedy administration’s failed coup against Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs, the Soviets had sent nuclear weapons to Cuba. They were capable of striking most American cities, including New York and Washington.

“Time was short,” Mr. Sorensen remembered in an interview with The New York Times that was videotaped to accompany this obituary. “The hawks were rising. Kennedy could keep control of his own government, but one never knew whether the advocates of bombing and invasion might somehow gain the upper hand.”

Mr. Sorensen said, “I knew that any mistakes in my letter — anything that angered or soured Khrushchev — could result in the end of America, maybe the end of the world.”

The letter pressed for a peaceful solution. The Soviets withdrew the missiles. The world went on.

Theodore Chaikin Sorensen was born in Lincoln, Neb., on May 8, 1928 — Harry S. Truman’s 44th birthday, as he was fond of noting. He described himself as a distinct minority: “a Danish Russian Jewish Unitarian.” He was the son of Christian A. Sorensen, a lawyer, and Annis Chaikin, a social worker, pacifist and feminist. His father, a Republican who had named him after Teddy Roosevelt, ran for public office for the first time that year; he served as Nebraska’s attorney general from 1929 to 1933.

Lincoln, the state capital, was named for the 16th president. Near the Statehouse stood a statue of Abraham Lincoln and a slab with the full text of the Gettysburg Address. As a child, Mr. Sorensen read it over and over. The Capitol itself held engraved quotations; one he remembered was “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

Mr. Sorensen earned undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Nebraska and, on July 1, 1951, at the age of 23, he left Lincoln to seek his fortune in Washington. He knew no one. He had no appointments, phone numbers or contacts. Except for a hitchhiking trip to Texas, he had never left the Midwest. He had never had a cup of coffee or written a check.

Eighteen months later, after short stints as a junior government lawyer, he was hired by John F. Kennedy, the new Democratic senator from Massachusetts. Kennedy was “young, good-looking, glamorous, rich, a war hero, a Harvard graduate,” Mr. Sorensen recalled. The new hire was none of those, save young. They quickly found that they shared political ideals and values.

“When he first hired me,” Mr. Sorensen recalled, Kennedy said, “ ‘I want you to put together a legislative program for the economic revival of New England.’ ” Kennedy’s first three speeches on the Senate floor — late in the evening, when nobody was around — presented the program Mr. Sorensen proposed.

Kennedy made his mark with “Profiles in Courage,” published in January 1956. It was no great secret that Mr. Sorensen’s intellect was an integral part of the book. “I’ve tried to keep it a secret,” he said jokingly in his interview with The Times. But Mr. Sorensen drafted most of the chapters, and Kennedy paid him for his work. “I’m proud to say I played an important role,” Mr. Sorensen said.

He spent most of the next four years working to make his boss the president of the United States. “We traveled together to all 50 states,” Mr. Sorensen wrote in his book “Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History,” a memoir published in 2008, “most of them more than once, initially just the two of us.” There was no entourage until Kennedy won the Democratic nomination in 1960. It was not clear at the outset that he could do that, much less capture the White House.

“It was only after we had crisscrossed the country and began to build support at the grass roots, largely unrecognized in Washington, where Kennedy was dismissed as being too young, too Catholic, too little known, too inexperienced,” Mr. Sorensen said in the interview.

In those travels, Mr. Sorensen found his own voice as well as Kennedy’s. “Everything evolved during those three-plus years that we were traveling the country together,” he said. “He became a much better speaker. I became much more equipped to write speeches for him. Day after day after day after day, he’s up there on the platform speaking, and I’m sitting in the audience listening, and I find out what works and what doesn’t, what fits his style.”

The Kennedy White House was never a Camelot: “Neither Kennedy nor any of us who worked with him were mythical characters who had magical powers,” Mr. Sorensen said, “and we obviously had our share of mistakes.” But Mr. Sorensen was not ashamed to say he worshipped Kennedy. He was devastated by his assassination in November 1963.

“It was a feeling of hopelessness,” he said, “of anger, of bitterness. That there was nothing we could do. There was nothing I could do.”

For more than 40 years after he left the White House, Mr. Sorensen practiced law, mostly as a senior partner at the New York firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. He counseled leaders like Nelson Mandela of South Africa and Anwar Sadat of Egypt.

His life went on, in public and private; he was writing and making speeches well past his 80th birthday. But it was never the same.

In 1970, two years after Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on the presidential campaign trail, Mr. Sorensen ran for the Senate seat that Robert Kennedy had held in New York. The run was a mistake, he conceded. “I simply thought that if I were to carry on the Kennedy legacy, if I were to perpetuate the ideals of John Kennedy, as Robert Kennedy tried to do, that I would need to be in public office,” he said. “Frankly, it was an act of hubris on my part.”

In December 1976, out of the blue, President-elect Jimmy Carter offered Mr. Sorensen the post of director of central intelligence.

“I had to make a very quick decision,” Mr. Sorensen remembered. “I did not know whether a lawyer and a moralist was suitable for a position that presides over all kinds of law-breaking and immoral activities. But I wanted to be involved. I wanted to be back in government at a position where I could help things in a sound and progressive way, and so I said, ‘Yes, I accept.’ ”

Opponents of the nomination pointed out a potential problem. More than 30 years before, after the end of World War II, Mr. Sorensen, not yet 18, had registered with his draft board as a conscientious objector to combat. President-elect Carter’s top aide, Hamilton Jordan, placed an angry call to Mr. Sorensen, asking why he had not mentioned this suddenly salient fact before accepting the nomination.

The nomination was withdrawn. That ended Mr. Sorensen’s ambition to return to work in Washington.

A stroke in 2001 took away much of his eyesight, but afterward Mr. Sorensen continued to lead “a very full life, speaking, writing, creating new enterprises and mentoring many young people,” his wife said.

Mr. Sorensen remained active in Democratic politics and took a particular liking to a freshman senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, when he arrived in Washington in 2005. When Mr. Obama began running for president two years later, Mr. Sorensen endorsed his candidacy and campaigned across the country, particularly to audiences who were opposed to the Iraq war.

“It reminds me of the way the young, previously unknown J. F. K. took off,” Mr. Sorensen said in an interview with The Times in 2007.

A year after Mr. Obama took office, Mr. Sorensen acknowledged frustration with his presidency, particularly the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, a conflict that he called “Obama’s Vietnam.” But, Mr. Sorensen said, “The foreign policy problems are more difficult than they were in Kennedy’s day.”

“I still think it was amazing that a man with his skin color — and also he was a liberal Democrat, let’s face it — was elected,” Mr. Sorensen said in a 2009 interview in his Manhattan apartment, where a photograph of Mr. Obama joined a tableau of images from the Kennedy administration. “I haven’t the slightest doubt that there are a lot of white men who still find it difficult to accept the fact, the reality, that we have a black president in this country.”

President Obama said Sunday in a statement, “I know his legacy will live on in the words he wrote, the causes he advanced, and the hearts of anyone who is inspired by the promise of a new frontier.”

Mr. Sorensen’s 1949 marriage to Camilla Palmer and his 1964 marriage to Sara Elbery ended in divorce. In 1969 he married Gillian Martin. Besides his wife, he is survived by their daughter, Juliet Sorensen Jones; three sons from his first marriage, Eric, Stephen and Phil; a sister, Ruth Singer; a brother, Phillip; and seven grandchildren.

Despite his stroke in 2001 and his diminishing eyesight, Mr. Sorensen worked on and completed “Counselor,” his memoir, over the next six years. “I still believe that the mildest and most obscure of Americans can be rescued from oblivion by good luck, sudden changes in fortune, sudden encounters with heroes,” he concluded. “I believe it because I lived it.”

Jeff Zeleny and Joseph Berger contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on November 1, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: THEODORE SORENSEN, 1928-2010; Kennedy Wordsmith and More. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe